Adult-to-Adult: starting small

When hosting the Practical Self Management Intensive, I always tell participants that the importance of the weekly reflection space isn’t about writing something radically new or meaningful, but just to get into a practice to sharing reflections out loud with fellow course participants and the world more widely. It doesn’t have to be an essay — it can just be a few sentences.

It’s rather fitting that the first topic of Greaterthan’s new Lead Together course is all about adult-to-adult relationships — cause here I am, “adulting” up and trying to take my own advice.

I have a pretty big block around writing. And like most fears, it gets worse the longer I don’t engage with the thing that scares me. I have a pretty consistent limiting belief that if I can’t tackle something properly, then it’s best to just wait and address it later, when I have more time, more energy, more resources. But the brutal truth is those are just stories that keep me far away from the thing that scares me. These are strategies that while protecting me aren’t always serving me.

When thinking through this from the lens of parent-adult-child states, I realise the ways in which I behave as a pretty critical parent to myself (and also an avoidant child! who said you can’t be in multiple states at once?!) whilst being a caring parent (taking too much responsibility) towards others.

I wasn’t able to attend much of the first week of the course — I had said this upfront to Susan and Lucia, but I was still grappling with my guilt over this: feeling like I had not shown up the way I wanted for my fellow participants. And yet as I reflected on the readings, I realised that maybe the very lesson I needed to learn in adult-to-adult relating was to accept my limitations, accepted what I was and wasn’t able to give, without overly holding myself responsible.

So there we go — just a few little crumbs of some rushed reflections, but hey, we all got to start somewhere! Let’s see where next week takes us.